Semiotic analysis of news photos in the context of gender: Turkish Photo Reporters Association of the Year a review of a selection of press photos

Gender imposes different roles on women and men. These roles, which are constructed by the social structure in order to sustain masculine domination, are produced and circulated by various social mechanisms. One of the most important of these mechanisms is the mass media. As a part of these mass media, news photos include gender roles in their content and thus produce gender inequality and reflect it back to the society. In this study, 20 photographs selected from the press photos of the year by the Photojournalists Association of Turkey between 1988 and 2022 were examined in the context of gender inequality. All the photographs in our research were analyzed with the semiotic analysis method, which is one of the qualitative research methods. The stereotypes of women in the photographs, which were analyzed with semiotic analysis, were also revealed by content analysis in order to support the obtained data. According to the results of the research findings, the gender roles in the news photos reflect the gender roles in daily life. The stereotypes of women in news photos are also reproduced by teaching gender roles as in daily life. Keywords: News Photography, Gender Inequality, Photojournalists Association of Turkey, Semiotic Analysis.